Review: Robert Adam's London

Abstract

Robert Adam's London Sir John Soane's Museum, London 30 November 2016–11 March 2017 Readers familiar with Sir John Soane's Museum but who have not visited it in the past few years will be surprised by the significant changes that have been made to this celebrated but necessarily somewhat static house museum. Entry is now through number 12 Lincoln's Inn Fields rather than, as for the past two centuries, through number 13. The front dining room of number 12, which (remodeled by Eva Jiricna Architects) served as the Soane Gallery exhibition space from 1995, is now the museum's shop. The gallery has been transferred to the floor above, where it occupies the space some scholars will remember as the research library set up by Sir John Summerson in 1969–71. This latest remodeling, completed in 2010 by Caruso St John Architects, comprises two rooms, the southern painted out in Soane's version of Pompeian red and the northern in pinky-gray with an orange-and-black striped border, both rooms having extensive fixed wall and freestanding central vitrines.1 Into these modern but appropriately historicizing spaces the Soane Museum's curator of drawings and books, Frances Sands, placed what—perhaps surprisingly—was the first monographic exhibition on Robert Adam's design work for London, the city where he lived from 1758 until his death in 1792 and where he worked for more than 350 different patrons. Given the limited space available, the devotion of much of one wall in the first room …